The dream landscape

Most of the time, I don't remember my dreams.  And I am, on the whole, grateful for this, because when I do remember my dreams, it's usually because I've had a very disordered and unsatisfactory night's sleep - waking, or rising close to waking, several times.

On the other hand, the dreams I do remember tend to be extraordinarily vivid and richly detailed (and, often, narratively coherent), which makes me occasionally just a little regretful that I don't recall more of them.  A lot of people, I know, recommend keeping a notebook beside the bed to jot down anything you happen to remember if you wake briefly in the middle of the night - a 'Book of Dreams'.  I wonder quite how that works - is it just a case of facilitating the capture of fleeting memory traces, the fragments of dream story which endure in the first few moments of waking but have disappeared forever long before morning comes, or.... does the presence of the book, greedily waiting for content to be added to it, somehow make you more likely to wake up, more likely to remember, perhaps even subtly influence the kind of dreams you have?  Well, whatever - it wouldn't work for me at the moment, because the light in my bedroom's broken...

As I said in the opening post on here (long since added to the sidebar as the 'About the Blog' description), my memories of my drinking life tend to get muddled together; the fact that they all reside in a common category of my memory tends to create the misleading sensation that these recollections are all closely linked temporally and geographically as well.  Instead of a 'memory palace' for structuring my mental records, I seem to have a 'memory bar street' - and, usually, I picture it as being in either Oxford or Edinburgh (the two best pub towns I have known).  It worries me slightly that after so many years of drinking - almost exclusively - in Bejing, I might start to reassign my earlier drinking recollections, to locate them all in Nanluoguxiang or Sanlitun Nanjie or 'The Car Park'.  Luckily, that shows no signs of happening.  Perhaps quality trumps quantity in establishing the tracks - and the filing cabinets - in our memory.  Or perhaps it's just that the earliest memories create the templates, and later ones, however powerful or numerous, always meekly slot into the existing scheme.

Lately, I've been growing increasingly concerned about how this architecture of the memory may get distorted by the relentless industriousness of the imagination: as we get older, does it inevitably become harder - impossible - to distinguish between things that really happened and things we merely imagined.  I fear it may be a particular hazard for such an incorrigible storyteller as myself: casting an anecdote into words gives it a far more rigid and enduring form than the original memory, and can displace or corrupt that memory; the natural human impulse to embellish (and especially to seek to justify or exonerate oneself) can all too easily recast our image of what actually happened.  I am guiltily aware of there being a couple of stories I've invented about myself that now seem quite as real to me as my actual experiences, to the point where I am now only dimly, uncertainly, aware of the fiction; and, as my memory starts to become less robust in middle age, I fret that there may be other made-up (or heavily airbrushed!) incidents - tall tales and curious coincidences and moments of minor heroism - that have now become completely assimilated into what I think of as the true recollections of my real life.  My god, yes, this blog is probably full of them.

Anyway, this has been preying on my mind particularly of late because in the past week or so I've had two or three instances of - seemingly extended - dreaming about past phases of my life where I was drinking a lot (and enjoying my drinking!); but I realise that, although they fit very plausibly into my life history (the last, most intricate, mostly crisply remembered dream-sequence was clearly set during the period when I was working in Oxford in the early 1990s),.... well, um, these events, these drinking sessions didn't actually happen, these wonderful, sleazy, characterful bars didn't exist.  And yet they now seem very much as though they did; already I am having difficulty disentwining them from my real memories of Oxford in the '90s; and I rather fear that, before too long, they could supplant those true memories, or at least gain equal status alongside them, no longer recognised as products of the imagination.

I know I have had similar dreams quite often in the past; but usually these have been about single incidents or single nights of drinking, and mostly confined to just one bar - indeed, confined to a bar that did in fact exist, or was recognisably modelled on one or more bars that really existed (although there was an instance of a recurring dream I had a couple of years ago where the bar setting was a pure fantasy, with no close parallels in the real world).  These latest dreams were like potted summaries of extended periods in my life, involving whole networks of bars that I went to at different times, with different people, for different reasons - an astonishingly intricate fiction!!

And the dominant emotion I felt on waking from these dreams - before all the self-reflective angst above set in - was.... regret.  I found myself thinking, "Damn, THAT was good.  Pity that never happened.  I think that was actually even better than my Oxford experiences in the '90s."